[Ford Man]

At an average of 40 MPH my '88 Ford Escort with 518,400 miles would have ran 12,960 hours using regular oil changes (dino). No, it hasn't been ran at WOT all this time, but about 12 years ago I was driving 125 miles a day to and from work for about a year and about 75 miles of this was 4 lane and interstate driving. During the 75 miles of 4 lane/interstate driving 80-90 MPH (approximately 4,000-4500 RPM) was pretty common 5-6 days a week for a year on an engine in excess of 300,000 miles at that time with no oil related problems.

Lets figure the rpm's on my engine. At the 40 MPH average, total hours ran 12,960 x 60 = 777,600 minutes of running time. 777,600 minutes x 2,000 rpm's (estimated) = 1,555,200,000 revolutions with no rebuilds. My 1.9L 4 cylinder engine using the lower grade motor oil (dino) with regular changes has made over 1.5 billion revolutions. So my engine has almost 31.85 times the revolutions on it that your example has. I'm not comparing my type driving to the type driving they did in the test but just comparing stokes of the piston which equals wear. Even at today's oil prices doing it myself costs about $12. per oil/filter change or $.0024 per mile on a 5000 mile oil change interval. I think even you would agree this is pretty cheap insurance for your engine. Even if your engine lasted 250,000 miles with no oil changes at a replacement cost of $2,500. (under estimated, probably closer to $5,000.) that would be a cost of $ .01 a mile. At 518,400 miles at today's price of $.0024 per mile I've spent $1,244.16 on oil/filter changes, less than 1/2 what I estimated a replacement engine at and mine is still running. You may argue I've used 105 gallons of oil unnecessarily, but used oil can be recycled and reused.

Since I started my fuel log over 45,000 miles ago my average MPG has been 41.54 MPG, so using this as a lifetime average on my car I've burned 12479.5 gallons of fuel or approximately 47,235 liters.

I'm personally not impressed with a car engine running 148 hours at WOT. Even small lawn equipment engines run at WOT, the current hours on my riding lawn mower engine 20HP Kohler is over 500 with 50 hour change intervals on an air cooled engine that commonly sees 3+ hours of continuous use at WOT.

When I see you sitting on the side of the road, because you've failed to properly maintain your engine I'll drive by in my Escort and give you a wave!! I've also driven one car without regular oil changes for over 30,000 miles, because it was using a lot of oil and the car was in poor condition, but in that 30,000 miles of driving I noticed the oil consumption increased from about a quart every 500 miles to a quart about every 300 miles a 66.7% increase in oil consumption in 30,000 miles.